A network file server typically includes a digital computer for servicing storage access requests in accordance with at least one network file access protocol, and an array of disk drives. The computer has been called by various names, such as a storage controller, a data mover, or a file server. The computer typically performs client authentication, enforces client access rights to particular storage volumes, directories, or files, and maps directory and file names to allocated logical blocks of storage.
Data consistency problems may arise if multiple clients or processes have concurrent access to read-write files. Typically write synchronization and file locking have been used to ensure data consistency. For example, the data write path for a file has been serialized by holding an exclusive lock on the file for the entire duration of creating a list of data buffers to be written to disk, allocating the actual on-disk storage, and writing to storage synchronously. Unfortunately, these methods involve considerable access delays due to contention for locks not only on the files but also on the file directories and a log used when committing data to storage. In order to reduce these delays, a file server may permit asynchronous writes in accordance with version 3 of the Network File System (NFS) protocol. See, for example, Vahalia et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,893,140 issued Apr. 6, 1999, entitled “File Server Having a File System Cache and Protocol for Truly Safe Asynchronous Writes,” incorporated herein by reference. More recently, byte range locking to a file has been proposed in version 4 of the NFS protocol. (See NFS Version 3 Protocol Specification, RFC 1813, Sun Microsystems, Inc., June 1995, incorporated herein by reference, and NFS Version 4 Protocol Specification, RFC 3530, Sun Microsystems, Inc., April 2003, incorporated herein by reference.)
In a network environment, it is often desirable to provide multiple data movers for providing client access to the network storage so that clients may access the same file from any of the data movers. To ensure data consistency in this situation, a respective one of the data movers is designated as the exclusive owner of each file for the purpose of granting read-write access to the file. If a data mover receives a client request for read-write access to a file that the data mover does not own, then the data mover forwards the request to the data mover that owns the file. In this situation, the data mover owning the file is said to be primary with respect to the file, and the data mover having initially received the request from the client is said to be secondary with respect to the file. Protocols for file access in this situation are further described in Xu et al., U.S. Pat. No. 6,324,581 issued Nov. 27, 2001, incorporated herein by reference.